.... as far as I can see, Carmen Fariña has closer ties to the top 2% income bracket than the other 98% of the population and has always been willing to play political games... It remains unclear to me what Fariña has to offer the working class and poor Black and Latino students who have been left behind in the Bloomberg years....Alan Springer, HufPoI've been presenting a variety of views on Farina, both pro and con. This Alan Singer piece at HufPo is pretty much con. Here he raises an interesting issue. Was Farina's success at PS 6 due to her attracting wealthier white parents or improving the lot of the struggling students?
She was principal at PS 6 on Manhattan's Upper East Side where the zip code is 10028, the median household income in 2011 was $107,895, and the population is 83% White. Fariña worked at PS 6 when Anthony Alvarado was Superintendent of Community School District 2 and achieved supposedly miraculous school improvement by offering special programs that attracted Manhattan's wealthy and professional families to the district's schools. PS 6 became a very popular school with New York's economic elite and benefited from being a Columbia Teachers College Mentor School, having close ties to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and receiving Annenberg grants.Wasn't that the mantra of the Bloomberg years? Make it look like education was improving by changing the kids -- the essence of what they did by chopping large schools into smaller ones, screening out the most difficult kids from the smaller ones and sending them down the line to the next large school in the daisy chain, or domino effect.
Fariña started as a teacher at PS 29 in tree-lined Brownstone Brooklyn located in the 11201 zip code where the population is 60% White and the median household income was over $91,000 in 2011.I'm not sure of this is a fair point given that Farina taught at PS 29 at a very different time. Singer should have given is the 11201 zpi code stats when she taught at PS 29, not 2011. (I'm too lazy to check them myself but I remember Cobble Hill as not being a gentrified area at that time.
Carmen Fariña first worked with Bill de Blasio when she was District 15 Superintendent in Brownstone Brooklyn and he was on the school board. It remains unclear to me what Fariña has to offer the working class and poor Black and Latino students who have been left behind in the Bloomberg years.By the time she came back to District 15, many areas were in full gentrification mode. Thus the charge that the Lucy Calkins model would only work with gentrified kids in large classes and a level of arrogance that teachers who could not manage the feat of making it work were below par.
Fariña was also a Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning during the Bloomberg/Klein regime where her reputation as an advocate for children gave legitimacy to their programs. I only met Carmen Fariña once, at a social studies teachers' conference in 2006. We exchanged a few words and I expressed disappointment that Fariña did not speak out more forcefully for good education. At the time Bloomberg and Klein were trying to force secondary school teachers to use an inappropriate elementary school lesson format called the Workshop Model. Fariña's office maintained that New York City had no standardized lesson plan format, but that did not stop the DOE from enforcing one. Soon after our encounter Fariña quietly retired as deputy chancellor, suspected of using her influence to help a colleague who lived in New Jersey illegally place his child at PS 29.The latter point was the Leo McCaskill, principal of Brooklyn Tech, story and that would require an entire blog post of its own. Sort of unfair of Singer to make the automatic assumption that this is why she left, but certainly might have been a factor.
Read the full post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
and below. Singer's being miffed that DeB hasn't gotten back to him to discuss the situation in the schools is, well, you fill in the blank.
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